Category Archives: Commentary

Cracking Down on Conflict of Interest in Indian Cricket

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Cricket has become a mainstay of India’s sports culture, particularly after the Indian Men’s Cricket Team brought home its first World Cup in 1983. Yet Indian cricket has also been rocked by numerous embarrassing corruption scandals, many involving match-fixing and illegal betting (see, for example, here and here). These scandals have also prompted questions about more pervasive corruption, cronyism, and conflict of interest in the sport’s governing bodies, particularly the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). It has proven especially difficult to root out these problems because the BCCI is considered a private organization, and is therefore not covered by India’s Prevention of Corruption Act (PoCA) and Right to Information (RTI) Act. Notably, this is something of an anomaly: Most other sports authorities in India are “National Sports Federations,” autonomous bodies that are considered public bodies for legal purposes. Yet the BCCI has so far successfully resisted being similarly classified, on the grounds that, unlike these other sports authorities, it does not receive direct financial support from the state.

This should change, on grounds of both law and policy. As a legal matter, the BCCI meets the criteria for classification as a public body. As a policy matter, subjecting the BCCI to the PoCA, RTI Act, and other Indian anticorruption and pro-transparency laws would go a long way to cleaning up the corruption mess in Indian cricket. Continue reading →

When Did EU Anticorruption Conditionality Work, and When Did It Fail?

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When countries apply for membership in the European Union (EU), the EU has substantial leverage to insist on various economic, political, and governance reforms—including anticorruption reforms. The EU has used this leverage, mandating (among other things) various anticorruption measures as a condition for accession. Has this worked? Does this form of conditionality help galvanize meaningful improvement in the corruption situation in candidate countries?

One of the most systematic attempts to answer this question, a 2014 study by Mert Kartal, compared corruption trends from 1995-2012 in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that did and did not apply for EU membership. The study found that applicant countries made significant progress during the accession process—but after accession, these countries’ anticorruption performance tended to deteriorate substantially. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the EU loses its leverage after accession takes place. Nevertheless, the finding is disheartening, in that it casts doubt on whether the EU was able to spur meaningful, lasting anticorruption reform. Notably, though, the results were not uniform across the twelve applicant countries studied: In some, the improvement that occurred prior to accession almost completely reversed after accession, but in others, the improvements appeared more sustainable. Diving into individual stories of accession suggests several factors that may have played an important role in the success or failure of EU attempts at using the carrot of membership to spur sustainable anticorruption reform. Continue reading →

Sri Lankan Bill on Proceeds of Crime and Corruption Damage Actions

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A distinguished group of Sri Lankan judges and lawyers recently released draft legislation to recover the proceeds of crime and compensate corruption victims. Prepared at the request of Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, enactment of such a bill is one of conditions of the $2.9 billion International Monetary Fund loan to stabilize the economy and restore economic growth.

While the proposed legislation exceeds the IMF requirement, providing for both criminal and non-conviction-based forfeiture of the proceeds of any crime, its overriding significance is it offers means for recovering the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars corrupt officials have stolen from Sri Lankan citizens. The bill also establishes administrative procedures for compensating those injured by the corrupt act that generated the confiscated assets and granting anyone harmed by corruption the right to bring a civil action for damages.

The bill is accompanied by a clearly written report spelling out its provisions and explaining their rationale. A very nice diagram illistrates how the various freezing, seizure, and confiscation provisions will operate. Those in other nations struggling to write their own asset recovery or victim compensation legislation will find much of value in the Sri Lankans’ effort. (Text of bill with report and diagram here.)

At the same time, the bill is still in draft. Its authors welcome comments and critiques from Sri Lankans and international observers. Comments can be sent directly to the Ministry of Justice. Or GAB will be pleased to forward them to the appropriate personnel.

UPDATE. GAB just learned that Transparency International Sri Lanka has also posted a request for comments on the bill along with a brief explanation of the bill importance and the need for public input in English, Sinhalese, and Tamil here. The link includes an address to which comments can be sent.

Reconciling Tradition and Modernity in Africa’s Anticorruption Struggle

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Even the most educated African citizens and public officials often have attachments to their cultural heritage. Perhaps for this reason, many African countries have retained traditional practices alongside modern governance institutions. While this has many advantages, such as increasing legitimacy and social cohesion, some of these traditional practices and attitudes are in tension with the contemporary state’s demands for accountability and transparency, and it can be challenging to differentiate acceptable and unacceptable practices at the intersection of the traditional and modern spheres.

Consider, for example, Sierra Leone. Prior to the establishment of the modern state, much of Sierra Leone consisted of chiefdoms. Sierra Leone considers the traditional institution of the chiefdom so vital that the Constitution reserves twelve seats in Parliament for Paramount Chiefs under customary law. What is the appropriate practice regarding gift-giving to chiefs who are also serving in Parliament? In traditional Sierra Leonean culture, visitors and petitioners are expected to give chiefs expensive gifts. However, under Sierra Leonean law, public officials, including Members of Parliament, are not allowed to accept gifts above a certain value. Similarly, in many of Sierra Leone’s chiefdoms, by custom, the chief would have the authority to determine land use rights, including those for activities like mining. However, under Sierra Leone’s written law, particularly the Mines and Minerals Development Act, the Ministry of Mines and the National Minerals Agency are empowered to grant licensing rights pursuant to the provisions of that Act. Mining company representatives often offer gifts to chiefs to acquire mining rights in their Chiefdoms—as tradition dictates. But offering such gifts to ministry officials would be an unlawful bribe under Sierra Leone’s anticorruption laws. More broadly, in many African societies—like most societies the world over—the traditional practice is to favor one’s family. This traditional kinship preference can create serious tensions for public servants: the expectations of their families and communities may conflict with ethical and professional rules that embrace universalism and prohibit nepotism as a form of corruption. Continue reading →

Fiddling While the Rainforest Burns: The KPK, Indonesia’s Natural Resources Sector, and Global Environmental Crisis

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Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populated country and third largest democracy, has attracted global media attention for its fight against high-level political corruption. Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, or KPK), which was established in 2004, has successfully prosecuted officials across the political spectrum and at levels ranging from corrupt city council members to the well-connected relatives of high-ranking central government officials. Yet despite the KPK’s many successes, corruption remains pervasive in resource extraction industries in Indonesia’s outlying islands. This entrenched corruption is a matter of concern not just for Indonesia but for the whole world, because corruption in this sector could kneecap efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions and could threaten the global transition to a green economy. The two sectors where this threat is most serious are nickel ore mining and palm oil farming:

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Does Corruption Flourish in a “Culture of Corruption”?

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A common intuition about corruption is that individuals are more likely to engage in corruption when they witness others committing corrupt acts without facing serious consequences—in other words, a “culture of corruption” can be self-perpetuating (see here and here), and the perception or belief that corruption is widespread can itself be a cause of corruption. While compelling, this intuition has not been subjected to much empirical scrutiny. While there does seem to be some evidence of an association between individuals’ perceptions of the prevalence of domestic corruption and those individuals’ inclination to act corruptly, the research on this topic is relatively thin.

In a recent paper, a group of academics (Israel Waismel-Manor, Patricia Moy, Rico Neumann, and Moran Shechnick) weighed in, presenting the results of a controlled lab experiment that sought to assess whether news about corruption by public officials affected individuals’ incentives to behave dishonestly. The study was conducted in Israel, and participants were required first to watch a short television news segment. The treatment group’s segment revolved around an Israeli mayor suspected of certain corrupt acts, while the control group’s segment was unrelated to corruption. The participants were also given a short quiz about the segment they’d seen, and half of the participants in each group were offered a monetary reward if they answered all the questions correctly; they were told “to answer all questions from memory” and not look anything up on the internet. However, unbeknownst to the participants, one of the questions could not be answered without doing additional searches, so the researchers could use the answer to this question to identify those participants who cheated on the test. The real goal of the study (of which participants were not aware) was to see whether exposure to the corruption news story (alone or in combination with the financial incentive) affected participants’ likelihood of cheating.

Unsurprisingly, participants who were offered money for answering all questions correctly cheated far more often, regardless of which news story they watched. The study’s authors seem to have expected that those participants who watched the corruption-related story would also cheat more (holding constant whether they had financial incentives to answer questions correctly). But this did not occur: Participants who watched the news segment involving a mayor suspected of corruption did not cheat in statistically significantly higher rates than those who watched the other, unrelated-to-corruption segment. The researchers suggested that perhaps the reason was that Israelis had been inundated with so much news about official corruption around the time of the experiment (which took place in 2019), particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior politicians (see here, here, and here), that the marginal impact of exposure to additional news about corruption, in the form of this one story, would not have much impact.

While that explanation is plausible, I have some other concerns about the research’s design and methodology, which make me question whether this experiment was in fact a good way to assess the “culture of corruption” hypothesis.

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Anticorruption Protests in Central and Eastern Europe: What They Do and How They Can Do More

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The beginning of 2024 was a period of unrest for several Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. In Slovakia, a series of protests erupted over Prime Minister Robert Fico’s plan to weaken the country’s anticorruption infrastructure. Meanwhile, in Albania, demonstrators took to the streets alleging corruption in the cabinet, demanding investigations, seeking the end of retaliatory investigations against opposition figures, and pushing for the ouster of corrupt officials. And journalists in Croatia turned out in masses to protest a whistleblowing law that would make the investigation of misconduct more difficult.

These aren’t the first anticorruption protests in CEE, and they won’t be the last. Over the past decade, citizens in CEE countries have become much more attuned to the problem of corruption and to their governments’ failure to do much about it. The result has been numerous episodes of citizen-based anticorruption movements. But while such movements have great potential for spurring meaningful change, many have proved ineffective. Why is this? Examining past episodes—for example, in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Balkans—may help us better understand the conditions under which anticorruption demonstrations succeed. These past episodes offer a few key lessons:

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The Quotidian Corruption of the NYPD

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In April 2024, the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) released a scathing report on how the New York City Police Department (NYPD) enforces parking laws in New York City. The report found, in relevant part, that the NYPD frequently opts to turn a blind eye to illegally parked vehicles displaying inapplicable or expired parking permits, letting NYPD and other City Government employees park illegally with no consequences. The DOI also found that the NYPD “has no written policies or procedures” for enforcing parking laws in the areas around police precincts and other government buildings in NYC, and Traffic Enforcement Agents told DOI investigators that were subject to internal discipline if they issued parking tickets in sufficiently close proximity to NYPD precinct buildings. This parking permit enforcement problem comes on top of the longstanding problem of “ticket fixing,” in which officers make parking and traffic tickets “disappear” as favors for friends. A favorite technique for helping friends or family (or those willing to pay) get out of tickets (or worse) is the practice of police officers giving out (or even selling) “PBA cards” (named for the Police Benevolent Association, the largest municipal police union in the world); with a quick flash of a PBA card, drivers can avoid a speeding ticket or even arrest. PBA cards have long been identified as a notorious example of petty corruption within the NYPD (see here, here, and here, and here). In fact, an NYPD officer sued the department last year, alleging he was demoted for ticketing a cardholder who was a friend of his supervisor (see here and here).

These are examples of what we might call “quotidian corruption”: officers deciding that low-level civil laws apply to some members of the public but not others, and engaging in this selective non-enforcement to help out friends, family, or those with the right connections. While there are certainly far more important forms of police misconduct, such as racial bias and improper use of deadly force, it would be a mistake not to take quotidian police corruption seriously. As one former NYPD police officer turned prosecutor and law professor commented, in connection with a high-profile ticket fixing scandal, even though the alleged behavior might not be “seriously corrupt,” ticket fixing must stop “for the sake of the public trust[] and the NYPD’s own reputation.” 

The NYPD is unlikely to address these problems itself. Even if the NYPD leadership decided to support more evenhanded enforcement for these low-level offenses, police unions would likely prevent any such reforms from taking place. This leaves the possibility of reform largely in the hands of New York City Government. Here are three potential reforms that City Government could undertake to help combat the quotidian corruption permeating the NYPD, listed in order from least to most challenging:

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The Invisible Front: Russia’s Corruption-Themed Propaganda War Against Ukraine

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The concept of “strategic corruption”—defined by the U.S. government as “when a government weaponizes corrupt practices as a tenet of its foreign policy”—has recently gained prominence as an important way to understand Russian foreign policy in the former Soviet republics, and elsewhere. The country that has faced the most sustained and systematic Russian state-sponsored strategic corruption campaign is almost certainly Ukraine. For the two decades preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia employed a wide variety of corrupt measures to influence Ukrainian politics, including the sale of vast quantities of discounted fossil fuels to bribe pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs and create a political class aligned with Kremlin interests (as exemplified by the “outrageously corrupt” tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych after his election in 2010); the cultivation of sympathetic media empires in the country; and money-driven attempts to discredit American officials perceived as obstacles to Russian influence. 

Much has been written on Russia’s use of this sort of strategic corruption. But there’s another aspect of Russia’s strategy that has become especially prominent since the 2022 invasion: using propaganda and disinformation to spread and amplify the narrative that Ukraine is pervasively corrupt. Here lies a paradox: for two decades, Russia deliberately fostered corruption in Ukraine to keep its neighbor firmly under its influence, and now Russia is seeking to leverage Ukraine’s reputation for corrupt practices to undermine Ukraine’s ability to resist Russia’s invasion.

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s Erosion of U.S. Anticorruption Law Continues

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The U.S. Supreme Court has been chipping away at the federal public corruption prosecutor’s toolkit over the past decade, in cases like McDonnell v. United States, Kelly v. United States, and Percoco v. United States. This past month, the Court heard oral arguments in a case called Snyder v. United States, which may further undermine federal prosecutors’ ability to go after state and local corruption. If the Court finds in favor of the defendant in Snyder, it could create a roadmap for American state and local government officials to profit from private interests at the expense of the public they are supposed to serve.

The specific statute at issue in the Snyder case is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 666. That statute, which happens to be the most prosecuted public corruption statute in the U.S., makes it a federal crime for a state or local official to “corruptly solicit[,] demand[,] …or accept[] … anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with any” federally funded program. The question at issue in the Snyder case is whether this statute criminalizes so-called gratuities—payments made in recognition of actions that a covered official has taken or has committed to take, but without any quid pro quo agreement to take those actions in exchange for the payment. The facts of the Snyder case illustrate this sort of payment: James Snyder, while mayor of Portage, Indiana, accepted $13,000, allegedly for “consulting services,” from a truck company shortly after that company was awarded a contract to sell garbage trucks to the city government. There is no evidence that the company offered or promised Snyder the payments in exchange for the contract. Nevertheless, the federal prosecutors successfully argued at trial that proving such an offer was unnecessary, because as long as the prosecution could show that the alleged “consulting fee” was actually a gratuity—a payment made by the company to thank, or reward, Snyder for the contract—then Snyder’s acceptance of this payment was enough to violate § 666.

It’s true, as Snyder’s lawyers argued to the Supreme Court, that the language of the statute does not explicitly include “gratuities.” But reading § 666 as covering gratuities is the only sensible way to read the statute if we are truly concerned with preventing public officials from being bought.

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